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If the United States wants to stop the wave of minors and young adults flooding across its southern border from Central America, it should help Hispanic women in those countries abort their children. That's the thesis of a “featured article” posted August 19 in YaleGlobal Online, a publication of Yale University.

Marisol Ruiz, a past Fox International Fellow at Yale, proposes that Congress “should attach specific conditions” to emergency aid packages designed to stop crime in Central America, “ensuring the money will implement policies focused on gender mainstreaming, highlighting the importance of transforming gender relations.”

“Gender mainstreaming” in the heavily Catholic region would “entail investing in maternal and newborn health, as well as investing in family planning and reproductive health.”

He was particularly concerned the region lacks “access to safe and legal abortions.”

“Central America is home to two of the seven countries in the world where abortion is banned in all cases,” El Salvador and Honduras, Ruiz noted. “The consequences of total criminalization of abortion” include “high maternal mortality.”

Pro-life policies and organizations instituted by Republican presidents are singled out as a cause of the current border crisis.

“U.S. partisan politics and aid policies have been complicit by discouraging family-planning resources for impoverished nations” by adopting the Mexico City Policy. The “Global Gag Rule,” as Ruiz called it, “sporadically applied since the 1980s by conservative administrations, prohibited foreign organizations receiving US economic aid the right to use non-US funding to provide information for legal abortion or advocate for the legalization of abortion in their country.”

President Ronald Reagan instituted the ban, which remained policy until President Bill Clinton repealed it. President George W. Bush reinstituted the policy in 2001, but it was against repealed by President Barack Obama.

Ruiz wrote that abortion must be promoted in the region to “avoid facing an ongoing humanitarian crisis and address its real concerns about demographics and security.”

He also cited Latinas' “unmet need for contraception.”

He views the push for abortion and contraception as a template to be exported to other nations, particularly poor nations with a transient population seeking employment or fleeing violence. “If implementation of such policies is successful, the lessons could be applied to every other region in the world with treacherous influxes of immigration,” he wrote.

That description could apply, for instance, to the Christian minority fleeing war-torn Iraq.

The website that published Ruiz's article, YaleGlobal Online is a publication of the Ivy League school's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. The center is dedicated to “globalization,” which it defines as the “increasing integration of the world' based on its “interconnectedness and interdependence.” The center's scholars acknowledge that deeply contested values like culture, the economic stability of the middle class, and national security – “issues like the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, the West's farm subsidies and intellectual property rights concerns, and the tightened visa policies of the U.S. since Sept. 11” – could “could throw a wrench into the engines of” internationalists.

But they feel “the historical process of reconnecting the human community” into a one world government “is here to stay and increasingly visible.”